Exploring alternativity of institutional repositories to subscription resources based on users’ accesses log

Abstract

Institutional repository (IR) has been widely deployed in a lot of universities and research institutions. Researchers all over the world share their research outputs in an openaccess way. Not only does it speed up the dissemination of scholarly information, but it can also decrease the cost in acquiring commercial databases. This article investigates whether IRs are the viable alternative to subscription resources. The primary result shows that the satisfaction rate is 8.255% based on 124,357 real users’ experiences. Furthermore, the different institutional repositories demonstrated their capability to complement each other in fulfilling the users’ access requests. The promising end result suggests that future studies should include more types of open-access repositories.